The month of traditional worship

Rhodes prescribed his memory when he asked to be buried on the Matopo hills. The significance of his wish can be seen from what followed his death in Cape Town and the funeral journey to the Matopos. The event replayed his colonial vision of connecting the Cape to Cairo. In beginning this theme, I want to show how his character was imagined as a memory of death foretold and how his death connected two countries, South Africa and the then Southern Rhodesia, monumentally and historically. The gigantic statues and memorials of Rhodes in highly elevated landscapes of Southern Africa suggest an imagined colossus and an empire builder. His fantasy of being associated with Napoleon Bonaparte, the French imperialist, can be seen as his inspiration to further imperialist ideas.

I learnt that to demonstrate his admiration from Napoleon he had collected a small sculpture of Napoleon which today is still kept in his bedroom at Groote Schuur house, a classical resemblance of how Africa is still fascinated by the loss of their oppressor.

I would get in too deep on images, symbolism and the retention of meaning, but let me reserve it for another series yet to come. Obviously Rhodes’ contemporaries, especially those who wrote along the grain of the discourse of empire, will always glorify him for his work.

Most interesting in this respect is how his biographers have interpreted the historical myth of Cecil Rhodes. If I were to brew controversy I would argue that if Rhodes had never lived, the liberation war might never have taken place, a different form of Zimbabwe might come about peacefully, and the present geopolitical situation in Zimbabwe might have evolved on different lines. I reject the notion of Rhodes as a unionist, an idea that is conveyed in colonial biographies.

Colonial histories of Rhodes have found their way into later public histories in Zimbabwe, Rhodes emerges as a unifier and as a symbol of union — which is aptly not true. This speaks to the capitalist ethic of his brand of imperialism. Rhodes imagined Zimbabwe, as a small village in or of England and his developmental plan was to convert it to such an English village.

This was realised when he promoted telegraph lines, railway lines and equal rights as part of legislation governing a British lifestyle in Zimbabwe. The experimental implementation of this kind of cooperation, risk-taking for white Rhodesians however, honoured Rhodes’ memory through the myth and histories. It was built on a colonial foundation. In this manner White Rhodesians saw and still see them as different from any other Zimbabwean yet they clamour that they are part of us because of birth and registration.

To draw this distinction they overemphasised their relation with a select number of “African intellectuals like Michael Hove. Rhodes was quoted: “my motto is equal rights for every civilised man south of the Zambezi. And further, “what is a civilised man? A man, whether white or black, who has sufficient